About

A short version, since long bios always feel performed.

I'm Irina Naskinova. I'm fifty-one. I live in Sofia and I walk in the park most mornings, often before the light reaches the trees. Twenty-five years of contemplative practice has been the floor underneath everything else — fifteen years of analytical work in data engineering, a long marriage, two daughters and a son, the slow re-reading of a few stories about myself I was handed early and have been quietly revising ever since.

This site is the park I'm walking, made writable.

I'm writing about self-knowledge in the age of AI — though the actual angle is more particular than that. The body knows direction before the mind does. The path of least resistance for a calling person is the one that looks hardest from outside. The practice of writing daily is a way of returning to the floor each morning.

What I take readers to:

• Benches — the long-form essays. Places to sit and stay with a thought.
• Lakes — the reflective pieces. Where I see my own life on the surface.
• Hills — framework essays. The wider view on AI, voice, the long arc.
• Squirrels — small observations from the walk.
• Small communities — writers and thinkers I'm learning from. The lineage I sit in.

Matcha in the morning before everyone else needs me to be someone. The park before the light reaches the trees. Sitting practice — breath, silence — has been the floor for twenty-five years. Daily writing, two to three thousand words. None of this is decoration. It's the floor.

I am not writing from the other side of the threshold. I am writing from inside it. If you need somebody who has already arrived to hand you the formula, you will be disappointed. If you are ready to think slowly with a companion who is also thinking slowly, you'll find what you came for.

Begin where you are.